


Tyger

by YouLookGoodInLeather



Category: Altered Carbon (TV)
Genre: And by Mickey, Character Study, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Mickey is not a Ryker fan, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Pre-Canon, Relationship Study, Thinly Veiled Ortega Worship, i mean me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-20 05:17:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13710651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouLookGoodInLeather/pseuds/YouLookGoodInLeather
Summary: 'Everyone at the BCPD thinks Mickey is in love with Ortega. And yeah, he is, but not like that. '________________________________In which Mickey probably comes close to dying multiple times, but he's remarkably okay with it. Also, Ryker is an asshole, and someone needs to tell him how to hide a drug habit if he's going to insist on having one.





	Tyger

Everyone at the BCPD thinks Mickey is in love with Ortega. And yeah, he is, but not like that. 

The problem is labelling it, which is unusual, because Mickey’s a certain type of workaholic meets know-it-all that means he always has a label for everything. Yet when Ryker naturally follows up his claim with ‘Like what then?’ Mickey draws a blank. He opens and closes his mouth like a guppy and nothing more, which earns one of those silent steely looks that Ryker gives you as a warning far more effective than words. 

Mickey thinks Ortega could do better than an asshole who’s also a moron, judging by his incompetence at hiding his drug habit, but that’s none of Mickey's business. Nor does he want it to be.

Really, it’s not like that.

Really, he shouldn’t even _like_ her, and she should _loathe_ him. She seems to at times, but then Ortega goes through periods of hating everyone. If she doesn't hate you at least once at one point or another, well, you must be a seriously boring fuck.

One day she’s in Mickey's darkly lit office scrutinising the nine different holoscreens, and he informs her that he can see her areolas through her shirt; She hates him for a good hour. Not for the first time, Mickey thinks he should probably be fearing for his life. It isn’t until Captain Tanaka drags Mickey into his office for a lecture and makes a big show about firing him that she stops calling for blood. 

She’s in his office the next morning bribing him with coffee for a less-than-legal trace on two Meths. ‘Does this mean I’m forgiven?’ He asks, because he’s as much an idiot as Ryker and can’t help pushing his luck. She looks at him. 

‘What?’ A frown crushes her brow, a real one, half puzzled, half irritated at the interruption from the chase. ‘What for?’ She doesn’t give him time to explain before pressing, ‘Will you run it, Mickey? This is my one chance to nail these guys.’

That’s just how it is. When he screws up, she reacts as she does to all cock ups: with indomitable rage and hissing threats in spanish. You pay your dues by surviving it. By the next day, everything is forgotten. He meets the fuck ups of others with insidious mockery and relentless teasing; He forgets nothing, and will make sure everyone else is the same for at least a month. That is, unless it sets off a Classic Ortega™ outburst, which is the only scenario that can bring him to ever forget anything. 

Ortega is a tough as nails, loud-mouthed brutality of a human being, aiming for the jugular of anything or anyone that gets in her way. Mickey avoids violence even more than he does free time, and likes his office job away from the front lines of justice perfectly well, thank you very much.

Point is, they shouldn’t get along. Everyone at the precinct thinks it’s because she’s hot and he’s not; because she’s a woman and he’s a nerd shut away in the broom closet; because she’s got breasts and he’s got eyes. 

She doesn’t start wearing a bra to work after he points out how the thrift shop tops she buys fail to conceal the geography of her chest. When she has herself positioned up close next to him later, leaning over his desk to squint at a salvaged recording, he feels nothing other than mild irritation at Ryker, who is letting himself get distracted by the aforementioned breasts instead of doing his damn job and studying the footage.  

Mickey doesn’t point out her areolas again, and she never wears a bra except on mornings when she stays at the gym too long to punch out her feelings, and thus doesn't have time to change. Neither feel any need for that to change.

‘But you like chicks,’ Ryker states over drinks one evening, referring back to Mickey’s short-lived relationship with a receptionist. Mickey doesn’t even bother to look up from the tablet he’s using to follow up Ortega’s latest semi-legal request. One hand holds the tablet, the other stabs at noodles and attempts to find his mouth without his eyes coming to its aid. It is not the most graceful process.

‘Ortega isn’t  _ chicks _ ,’ Mickey says without skipping a beat. That makes Ryker laugh, one of his more charming ones, though Mickey isn’t fond of how it’s steeped in derision. He doesn’t really care if it’s aimed at him, but if it’s aimed at the woman in question, Ryker’s more of an asshole than previously suspected.

‘What is she then?’ Mickey very nearly answers ‘a tiger’. His silence isn’t bought by any belief that said statement would be inaccurate, it’s just that this might get back to Ortega via the boyfriend, and he has too much work to do to survive an Ortega Classic™ this week. 

Ryker’s chatty from the beer and so he saves Mickey the trouble of answering. ‘I guess she’s pretty manly in some ways,’ he says.

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ Ryker doesn’t pick up on the irritation flickering in Mickey’s tone. ‘What I mean is I don’t think of her in a sexual way.’ It’s the first time he’s really realised that, that he looks at Ortega and knows she’s outlandishly attractive, but that it’s nothing more than a fact. 

So that’s one label he can strike off of his list. It is not ‘eros’ as the Ancient Greeks would say. And though Mickey loathes archaism and anyone who witters on about ‘the good old days’, that snarky remark makes him think of all the history lesson crap he wishes he could forget, and in it, he finds something useful. 

The Ancient Greeks had a term known as ‘storge’, a specific kind of love that could mean many things: a deep commitment between friends, an enduring partnership that did not rely on the romantic or the erotic, a platonic marriage of sorts, among other things. This certainly fitted, but there was one reading Mickey had discovered that translated it as ‘loving the tyrant’. Finally, he'd found his label.

‘She’s a tyrant,’ he informs Ryker when he remembers he’s got work to do and food to eat. ‘And she’s a very good one.’

It shouldn't be a term of endearment, but he means no derision by it. He cannot hate Ortega; Ortega believes in too much good for him to focus on her rough edges. Everything he respects in the human psyche is personified in her. Okay, sure, maybe he could do without the Spanish death threats, but then again, few things are more majestic than watching her rip someone to shreds when they deserve it. 

When she is every ounce as empathetic and compassionate as she is short-tempered and aggressive, how could he not love her breed of tyranny? It seems to him impossible to resent her for any of it, because every Classic Ortega™ storm is driven not by her malice, but by an unfaltering faith in the importance of justice. She wants to take the world and fix it one fiery lecture at a time, but is there to nurse it too. When he sees her treading on eggshells around Ryker to try and guide him gently, Mickey forgets work for ten minutes just to watch them through the open door.

And Mickey does not forget anything, not for anyone– anyone but Ortega.

He is not like her. He could not fly off the handle every other hour and chase evil further and further into the rabbit hole without so much as stopping to wipe the blood off of his face. But, perhaps, he realises that perhaps in some ways they are the same. He cannot leave a buried truth alone, and though he’s terrified at times of the pit Ortega’s dragging him down into with her, he knows it’s what’s  _ right _ , and so he can’t say no.  

They are two people of very different methods in pursuit of the same goal. It’s why they’re the last two on duty every day, every week, year in year out. She’ll be off in the fightdrome shouting arrest orders with blood drying in her hair, and he’ll be shut away in his office unable to outpace the stream of requests each day brings in, but in what they’re chasing, they’re united. There are bad guys to put away, and they’re both just grappling on as hard as possible to try and keep the casualties down. 

The death toll is always too high for them to ever have a night off. A grievance for them isn’t call for one month suspension; it’s the start of a month never once ceasing work, so that they don’t get time to breathe and remember. Ortega buries it with anger. Mickey’s fine, really. He’s the normal one. At least, he is so long as he keeps working.

One day she’s in his office. She hands him something. ‘I don’t have time to run anything for you, Ortega. Captain has me going over all the Meth DHF security networks after Bancroft’s breach.’ She ignores him and pushes the black box across the desk to sit in front of him in spite of his words. 

‘Happy Birthday.’

The day is November twelfth, and Mickey has completely forgotten it is his birthday– until now. 

‘Open it.’ He complies, and finds inside-

‘An ONI mod tap.’ This is the sort of tech that could be used for all kinds of heavy illegal shit in the wrong hands, but which also could make his life - i.e. his job - so much easier. He could mod his own ONI, rewrite the coding to enable perfect synchronicity with the BCPD array software and- no, he's getting ahead of himself. Gingerly, he lifts it free of the literal tissue she’d used as tissue paper to cushion it, and turns it in the screen-light. ‘But- how?’ He gives her _the look_ , one that is specific entirely to her and her apparent vendetta to get him arrested. ‘These are completely illegal.’

‘Are they?’ She muses, with an attempt at faked innocence that really doesn’t bode well given how half her job revolves around her poker face. ‘Huh. Funny. Guess that’s why Malachi had one lying around when I arrested him.’

‘You stole from a crime scene.’

‘Too many things have been going missing from evidence lately. I figured I might as well make sure this went missing into the right hands.’

He stares at her, but of course she doesn’t so much as flinch, nor even have the decency to look guilty. He despairs and loses his resolve all at once. ‘When they arrest me, I will deny we ever met.’

‘Is that a thank you?’ She asks, quirking a brow, her mouth doing its best not to smile. 

He doesn’t merit that question with an answer, but instead busies himself with tidying away the highly illegal piece of hardware into its black box and tucking it away. Straightening, she moves to leave, so it’s to her back that he calls after her, ‘Ortega? Just so you know, I love you.’ When she glances back at him with an incredulous expression, he hurries it up with, ‘Not like that.’

As baffled as her significant other by that statement, Ortega stops and peers at him for what feels like a _long_ minute. She’s still frowning when she crosses back over to him. 

She doesn’t say anything. All she does is bend down to kiss him soft and chaste on the cheek. She straightens, nods to herself. When she reaches the door again, she calls back over her shoulder, ‘I’m sending you over three encrypted files I need you to open for me, by the way.’

‘I knew you wanted something.’

Glancing back at him, she gives him her best fierce detective expression, but it cracks fast about the seams and as she leaves, she’s grinning and chuckling to herself. He thumbs the lid of the box, watching her go.  

In a world run by tyrants, he’s glad he plays minion to this one.

**Author's Note:**

> 'Mickey deserved better. Ortega deserved better. Ryker can shove it.' - My poetic opinion filtered through the lens of my writing this at 5am in the morning on no sleep, haunted by all the deaths the last few episodes threw at me.


End file.
